Core Totara is a brilliant foundation. It’s flexible, robust and trusted by organisations all over the world. But here at BuildEmpire, we pride ourselves on taking Totara and making it even better.
The BuildEmpire Edition is everything in core Totara, plus the plugins, blocks and styling we’ve built on top across three releases since September 2024.
Same Totara, more you.
If you’re already on Totara, or weighing it up, this guide shows you exactly what changes when you move to the Edition, area by area.
1. Your brand
In core Totara, you get a handful of colour settings and the default site font. It looks clean and professional, and while you can make it look like your own platform, there’s a limit to what you can do.
In the Edition, your platform looks like your organisation. We’ve built our own Totara theme with a cleaner, modern feel: rounded UI elements, an enhanced navigation menu and a completely restyled quiz activity.
You also get around 10x more colour controls than core. That means you can set button hover and border states, secondary header colours, link colours and page backgrounds, and toggle borders on or off. If you’d rather not fiddle, we can prepopulate everything from your brand guidelines.
And with Keystone 3.0, the Font Selector lets you use any Google Font across the whole site, so your LMS matches the rest of your brand down to the typeface.
2. The dashboard
Your dashboards are key in instructing learners what’s available to them.
From the homepage to other key pages, you want access to more blocks to make your platform user-friendly and encourage further learning. The Edition has a range of extra blocks to help support that.
| Core Totara | BuildEmpire Edition |
|---|---|
| Last Course Accessed block | Next Activity block points learners to the next module they need, right on the homepage |
| Latest Badges block | Badges block shows badges earned and the ones still available to earn |
| My Learning block | My Courses block groups courses by category, or shows them as a carousel |
| Not in core | Banner block adds a branded, clickable banner for news, campaigns or new courses |
| Not in core | Course Information block shows the course name, image and progress at a glance |
The result is a homepage that nudges learners forward instead of making them hunt. Showing badges they haven’t earned yet is a small change with a big effect, because it gives people something to aim for.
3. Course layouts
In core Totara, courses typically use the Topics format: a long, scrolling list of sections and activities. It works, but it’s easy for learners to lose their place.
In the Edition, you get two better options.
The Tiles format turns each section into a visual tile. If a tile has no image, it falls back to your brand colours automatically, so courses never look unfinished. You can show tiles as a grid or a carousel, and set site-wide defaults so your whole catalogue is branded in seconds.
The restyled Topics format (Keystone 3.0) keeps the familiar structure but adds high-contrast section headers and clear completion ticks, so learners can see their progress as they scroll.
4. Learning activities
In core Totara, media usually lives in standard file and URL resources, so learners click out to watch, listen or download. And their notes? Usually on paper, or nowhere at all.
In the Edition, three activities bring all of that into the course.
- Video activity (Citadel 1.0) plays YouTube, Vimeo or uploaded video inside the course, with captions and resume. You can set completion by the percentage watched and see who watched what in the reports.
- Audio activity (Colonnade 2.0) keeps playing when a learner’s phone screen locks, so podcasts and audio lessons work on the commute.
- Notes activity (Colonnade 2.0, with floating notes added in Keystone 3.0) lets learners take notes alongside any content and download them as a branded PDF.
Together they turn a course from a set of links into a place where learning actually happens.
5. Engagement: points, stars and leaderboards
In core Totara, there’s no native points system for rewarding learners.
In the Edition, gamification is built in. You choose what earns points, such as logging in, completing a course or posting in a forum, and how they show up: as gems or stars.
Leaderboards let you show who’s on top across any date range or audience, so a team, region or new-starter cohort can compete among themselves rather than against the whole organisation. In Keystone 3.0 we simplified the setup, so getting it running takes minutes, not an afternoon.
Used well, a little friendly competition is one of the easiest ways to lift completion rates without adding more reminder emails.
6. Commerce and security
In core Totara, there’s no built-in way to sell courses, and learners sign in with a standard username and password.
In the Edition, the eCommerce plugin (Keystone 3.0) turns your LMS into a storefront. Learners browse a catalogue with real-time search, pay securely through Stripe and are enrolled automatically, with no manual admin in between. It’s ideal if you train customers, partners or members as well as staff.
On security, Passkeys (Citadel 1.0) let learners sign in with their fingerprint, face or device PIN instead of a password. It’s faster for them and far harder to phish.
How the Edition keeps growing
The Edition isn’t a one-off customisation. It’s a product we keep investing in, with a major release roughly every year.
| Release | Date | Highlights |
|---|---|---|
| Keystone 3.0 | February 2026 | Course Information block, floating notes, restyled Topics, Font Selector, eCommerce |
| Colonnade 2.0 | February 2025 | Banner block, Notes and Audio activities, restyled quizzes, Tiles format, leaderboards |
| Citadel 1.0 | September 2024 | New theme and colour controls, gamification, Passkeys, Next Activity, Badges and My Courses blocks |
Same Totara. More you.
Everything you rely on in core Totara stays exactly where it is.
The Edition simply adds the branding, engagement and learner experience that make the platform feel like yours.
Already on the Edition? Many of these features are ready to switch on today, so get in touch and we’ll help you set them up.
Want to see it in action? Book a demo to discuss moving to Totara, or about switching Totara partners and remember, we offer free migrations for current Totara users.
